Remember that the 3DS is still very successful, and runs just off carts (well, also downloadable titles). It seems to run very smoothly.

In practice, there have been a few games that have had patches released -- in almost all modern games a tiny fraction of the game is code, which can be easily replaced, leaving all the art and music which (hopefully) don't need as much patching.

Well, modern carts like 3DS are quite different from old cart systems in the sense that they are handled more like storage devices than extension of the memory. I think GBA was the last system that allowed for example running code directly from the cart, without loading it first to RAM.

Games on the 3DS aren't typically renowned for their over-the-top graphism quality in the overall videogame scene; if you expected the same quality with the same resolution on the desktop, then you'd be doing what pjc50 said: compromises

Frankly the focus on graphics have long since reached the point of wankery.

That's your opinion. Graphics is also not the thing I'm most interested in, but let's not think that we are a realistic view of the overall market.

Sad but true. Too many beautifully rendered games that aren't terribly engaging because amazing graphics are what the mainstream market demands. (I've avoided buying the latest gen consoles partly because of this, but mostly because I just don't get the time to play games that much these days.)

That being said there are also many beautiful games that are amazingly fun, and the graphics do add to the experience, but they're more like the icing on the cake. That's not quite the metaphor I'm groping for, but you get the idea: the gameplay is a fundamental that has to be right, and then the graphics can really add something; without the gameplay the experience is always destined to be flat.

Yeah, i fail to see how the patch and DLC stuff can't be solved with some emmc added to the board.

It will be interesting to see what happens with VR games. With a regular game you can always do something else - check your phone, walk away for a moment. In VR you are stuck staring at a loading screen unable to easily do anything else. We are already seeing cases where people will abandon a VR experience just because they cannot handle the load times. Content creators take note.

> But I think it would still be possible to greatly improve load times with a bit of optimisation - it's just not commercially important.

A lot of work goes into optimizing titles on consoles... it wouldn't make sense to skimp on such an important part of UX.